


Lightning

by belmanoir



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-09
Updated: 2012-04-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 08:13:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belmanoir/pseuds/belmanoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snape just wants a quiet drink in the Room of Requirement, but Professor Trelawney and her cooking sherry are there before him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lightning

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first piece of fanfiction ever. (At the time, I thought it would also be my last, but now I laugh unkindly at my naiveté.)

Severus Snape, double agent (and soon-to-be triple agent if Dumbledore did not stop waving his withered hand around like some kind of disgusting trophy and encouraging the Potter whelp to fawn on him), was not happy. The sight of students flinching out of his way as he strode down the corridor gave him a certain vicious pleasure, true, but right now the only thing that would really make him feel better was a drink. Fortunately, if there were no students larking about in the Room of Requirement, he would soon have one.

He thought, not for the first time, that the Room was too powerful a magical tool to be used merely by tired professors who wanted a drink, or twitterpated students too lazy to find a proper place to snog. Why hadn't it been _studied_? Why hadn't anyone thought of going to the room and saying, "I need what will enable me to defeat Lord Voldemort"? The only reason Snape hadn't brought it up was that he would inevitably be assigned to do it himself--the rest of the Order were incurably shiftless, with the possible exception of the melancholic werewolf--and he didn't trust the Room.

"A quiet place to drink," he muttered, and the stone wall shifted into a door. Unfortunately, when he pushed the door open, the room on the other side was not quiet.

"Three of diamonds: loneliness. Three of spades: guilt. One-eyed knave of hearts: hidden love, a man who conceals half his face from the world, who serves those with greater power than he possesses," a slightly slurred voice murmured. An angular figure slumped in the shadows, and the smell of cooking sherry wafted towards him.

_Damn_. "Professor Trelawney," Snape said with disgust.

"Who's there?" she said shrilly, sitting up suddenly, her head and shoulders emerging into the light. Her hair was slipping from its knot, her face was flushed, and a shawl was slipping from her narrow shoulder, bringing her gauzy blouse with it and revealing a far greater expanse of pale skin than Snape had any desire to see. The woman needed to get out in the sun more. She blinked owlishly behind her enormous glasses, and her eyes narrowed in distaste. "Oh, it's you," she said.

"Delighted likewise," he told her. He considered turning and leaving, but blast it, he really wanted that drink. "If you're going to lower yourself to public drunkenness, I suppose I cannot stop you, but _must_ it be cooking sherry?"

Her magnified eyes turned considering. "Have you got anything better?"

"Certainly," he said austerely, retrieving his bottle of Glenlivet from an elephant's foot umbrella stand. "Are you sober enough to conjure glasses, or shall I?"

"Of course I am," she said with dignity. The glasses she conjured were wineglasses, but at least they were elegant Venetian models with winged snakes for stems. Evidently her taste was not quite so egregious when she was three sheets to the wind. Mutely, he poured a measure for himself, and a much smaller measure for her. Really, why Dumbledore hadn't already either fired this woman or found some way to keep her under control was beyond him.

She glanced between his glass and hers with a mutinous expression, but he must have looked forbidding enough to forestall protest. The speed at which she drank her smaller amount down was an insult to the Scotch.

"Why on earth does Dumbledore even keep you around?" he asked aloud.

She flinched. "I have the Inner Eye," she told him tremulously.

Snape snorted and went back to his Scotch. He wasn't that interested in the answer anyway. Dumbledore had his own Machiavellian reasons for everything.

"He was very impressed at my interview," she insisted. She eyed him resentfully. "You ought to know. You were there. _Eavesdropping_."

It was Snape's turn to flinch. He couldn't pretend, even to himself, that he had forgotten. Of course he hadn't. That interview--the prophecy--his report to the Dark Lord--the Potters dead: they were imprinted on his mind as irrevocably as the Dark Mark was imprinted on his left forearm.

"Probably trying to pick up tips for your own interview," she muttered.

"I was not," Snape snapped, stung. "I was--" He stopped, remembering suddenly why he had been standing outside Sibyll Trelawney's door. He hadn't thought of it in years--the terrible aftermath of that afternoon had overshadowed it completely. He had never told Dumbledore why he was in the Hog's Head, and Dumbledore had never asked--assuming, most likely, that his smallest action was the object of fascinated interest to the Dark Lord. But Voldemort, fortunately for his followers, would never have bothered sending a spy merely to listen to Dumbledore ramble on about goats and lemon drops to nervous would-be professors. It had been pure chance that Snape had been present. "Luck," the Dark Lord had called it.

The embarrassing, horrible truth, Snape recalled with a shudder, was that he had been on his way to ask Sibyll Trelawney to have lunch with him. It had been plain to the most casual observer that she couldn't afford enough to eat--that the Divinations job was her last desperate grab at respectability before she was reduced to telling fortunes in Knockturn Alley. Something about her thinness and distant expression had wrenched at him. Besides, knowing she was desperate for food had made the prospect of asking her out considerably less intimidating.

And, Snape remembered with a start, she had been pretty. All that blond, wispy hair, and long-lashed eyes huge behind her glasses, and beads and bangles and fringe and flashes of gold when she moved. He looked at her carefully. In the half-light, her petulant expression for the moment smoothed away by alcohol and curiosity, she was still pretty. Only he hadn't really looked at her in years, because when he looked at her he saw the Dark Mark over Godric's Hollow.

She was reddening under his scrutiny, a blush extending over her pale skin and down her neck and disappearing beneath gauze and fringe. He followed it with his eyes, and a part of himself he had thought completely atrophied burst into sudden life.

He shook his head to clear the alcoholic fog from it. He was going mad, and drinking on an empty stomach, and also he hadn't had sex in years. That was all. It had nothing to do with Sibyll and her perfect skin.

"I hardly needed to pick up tips from _you_ ," he said severely. "The last time I checked, half of _my_ lessons weren't being taught by a guest expert."

She didn't answer him, merely reached for the bottle and poured herself more whisky, sloshing some onto the floor in her haste. The naked misery on her face shamed him. If Dumbledore wasn't simply keeping her on in hopes of another prophecy, he probably thought he was doing her a kindness; but Snape had learned over the years that there were many things Dumbledore didn't understand. The woman couldn't teach her subject and she knew it. After years of trying, her face, once merely nervous and eager, fell naturally into deep lines of irritation and worry. And she was still too bloody thin. Of course, you couldn't blame her, when the last time she'd come down to dinner--two years ago--Professor McGonagall had ripped her to shreds in front of the students. James Potter's revolting brat had smirked.

Snape sighed. He suspected his own face had not improved over the past sixteen years. Wordlessly, he held out his own glass, and she filled it.

"At least you haven't got Granger in your class anymore," he offered. "That insufferable girl was created as a pox on teachers everywhere. Today she tried to correct my use of 'apparatus' as a plural."

"That spiteful girl has no notion of proper classroom behavior," Sibyll said grandly, sweeping a ring-laden hand and nearly knocking over the Glenlivet. "Her Inner Eye is very weak."

Snape listened to this condemnation of Hermione Granger, Sibyll's own owlish eyes tinged for the first time with something like warmth towards him, and felt a little breathless. Fortunately, her next words were like a bucket of cold water.

"Let me read the cards for you."

He drew back, irrationally panicked. He had too many secrets; what if she saw one?

He shook himself. That was ridiculous. Everyone knew she was a charlatan; even if he'd once heard with his own ears evidence that she possessed some of her great-great-grandmother's talent, well, that was an exception, and she hadn't remembered it afterwards. So he let her gather up her cards, and shuffle them. But on turning over the very first one, Sibyll gave a tiny shriek and scattered the cards all over the floor.

"What is it?" he asked, unnerved in spite of himself.

"Lightning," she whispered, her eyes even huger than usual behind her glasses. " _You_. You will bring down the tower. The calamity I have foretold--you." And she reached out and grasped the front of his robes with one of her slender, sparkling hands.

Damn and blast. The woman wasn't as talentless as everyone thought. And she was surprisingly strong--he was going to topple over onto her if she didn't let go. He pried her hand off him finger by ringed finger and snapped irritably, "How can you even tell which card you're looking at? You're blind as a bat!"

She abruptly let go of him and pressed her hands together in her lap. Snape tried not to feel guilty--or disappointed. "I can see perfectly well with my glasses on," she said with dignity.

"Have you thought about having Madame Pomfrey perform a Lasikius?" he asked, hoping to distract her further.

She looked away. "No one can do anything about my eyes," she said flatly. "It was an irreversible hex."

"Someone hexed your eyes?" he asked, genuinely shocked.

She shrugged. "My seventh year. Some of the bigger Gryffindors were picking on little Reggie Black. I was trying to stop them. I don't think they meant it to be permanent."

Snape felt cold. "Students often don't know their own strength," he said, thinking of Draco Malfoy bleeding all over the bathroom tile. Then his brain caught up with his ears. "You were a Slytherin?"

"Yes." She glared at him. "Why'd you think there were snakes on the glasses? But I suppose you thought I was a Hufflepuff like everyone else."

"Erm, sorry." She must have been a few years ahead of him. He tried to picture her without glasses, in school robes and a Slytherin tie, and couldn't. He didn't remember her at all. She hadn't been a girl people noticed much, he supposed. "What did they do to the students who hexed you?"

She looked at him in surprise. "Nothing. They were _Gryffindors_."

Snape thought about Dumbledore refusing to discipline Mad-Eye Moody for transfiguring Draco, and the Headmaster patronizing the Montagues while they watched their son babble and doze off at intervals, and Draco and Crabbe and Goyle in St. Mungo's after they were hexed into unrecognizable blobs on the Hogwarts Express. He was the Head of Slytherin, but he couldn't protect his students.

He thought of Black almost killing him, and Dumbledore telling him he should be grateful, because Potter had saved his life. He thought of Sibyll Trelawney putting on her enormous glasses for the first time.

For a moment, he thought of his Unbreakable Vow with something approaching lightness of heart.

Her hand was on his arm, and how had he never noticed the silver snake that coiled green-eyed around her delicate wrist? "Doesn't matter," she said tentatively, her words a little slurred now. "The glasses help. The stronger the Inner Eye, the weaker the Outer ones, you know." She shook her head. "Thought I was a Hufflepuff." She snorted, and looked at him sideways, almost slyly. "It takes cunning to keep a job you can't do for sixteen years."

"It might be cleverer to look for a job you _can_ do," he said.

"Cleverness is for Ravenclaws," she said, and smiled at him. And this was something he'd just learned about Slytherins--he should have known it already, from his own example, but it had taken Lucius's son to teach it to him this year. They were cunning, and they were sly, and they knew what they were about, but they could shoot themselves in the foot with their own empty pride like no one else.

Well, Snape was done with that. He leaned forward and kissed her. She tasted like Scotch and lost dreams and possibilities, and for a second his heart beat so wildly that his Occlumency slipped and he heard her thoughts.

_Mmm_ , she was thinking disjointedly, and _more_ , and _better than sherry_ , and _always had such a lovely hooked nose_.

Snape smiled against her mouth. The Room hadn't given him what he asked for, but it had given him exactly what he required.


End file.
